WordPress Content Locker Plugin : Social Locker Review

If you are a content producer and would like to generate more viral interest in your product then using a content locker is one way to do so. Essentially you offer something of value to your site’s visitors such as a free download like an eBook or piece of software and to access the content the person must share your link on social media to “unlock” access to it. It’s a technique that works extremely effectively – I trialled it here on WPLift with a free theme and I generated 1500 tweets :

If that sounds good and you would like to use a content-locker on your site then a new plugin which makes this easy to do has arrived called “Social Locker” which is available for WordPress or jQuery. You can download a free trial or purchase the full plugin for $23 for WP and $16 for jQuery.

Install The Plugin

Download the plugin as a zip file and then visit “Plugins” > “Add New” > “Upload” and upload the file.

Once you have activated the plugin, you will see a thank you screen which informs you that you successfully activated the trial version of the plugin and it will expire in 7 days.

Configure The Plugin

If you hit the “Learn how to use the plugin” button you are taken to a set of instructions which cover how to use the plugin to create your first content-locker :

Before creating your first “Social Locker” you should visit the “Common Settings” link in the new Social Lockers menu. Here you can enter your Facebook app ID, Choose a language for your buttons, turn on Google Analytics events ( a nice touch ) and choose whether to display the locked content in your RSS feed.

To begin setting up your first Social Locker, visit the “All Social Lockers” link and you will see there is allready one created “Default” so click that and you can edit that. On the edit screen you will see where to name the locker and enter a message to your site visitors. You can also set up shortcodes which you can wrap around the content you want protected :

Underneath this you will see a preview of what your buttons will look like and then you can change themes and add other services :

The available themes are well designed and should fit into most sites well :

In the social options box you can set which social media sites to use and drag them to re-arrange the order. You can also the set the options for each one to use, for example – what message to tweet, URL to tweet and so on. The available sharing options are as follows :

Tweet

Facebook Like

Google + Add

Facebook Share

Twitter Follow

Google + Share

Linkedin Share

Once you are done setting up your options here, you simply wrap your content you want to protect with the provided shortcode. Visit the front-end of your site and you will see the locker in action. To check your stats there is a nice “Usage Statistics” page :

Conclusion

I really liked this plugin – it feels very clean and polished to use – the install and setup was a breeze and I like the interface. You can tell this is a “premium” quality product.

We have talked a little in the past about restricting access to content with these types of plugins and there are quite a few available but this one definitely feels the nicest to use. As I mentioned at the start, I saw great results using this method of promoting my free theme – I ultimately removed it as I would prefer to not restrict access to my content to people who use a specific social network.

If you have good content though, this is a great way to help it “go viral”. Give it a trial for 7 days for free and see how you get on with it …